Posted by FRED on November 03, 2005 at 10:01:02
Hi folks I’ve been reading over the James Seemore posts with great interest although I must admit I’ve had to speed read a lot of them cos I’m so short on time.
Allow me if I may to offer some personal observations which you can take or leave. I think my impressions are correct but someone might prove me wrong.
It’s my experience as a youth counsellor that any communication that is; name calling, belittling, condescending, provocative, ridiculing, superior, stereotyping, coercing or bullying forces the recipient to react to the delivery of the message rather than what is actually being said. Regrettably many of the posts include this kind of language albeit some very subtly and this does not endear open honest discussion, in fact it often provided the recipient to emotionally respond to the messenger which may or may not have been a convenient smoke screen for avoiding some very important questions asked in the original post or in other posts which contained no negativity whatsoever. I wish to avoid names but if you re-read the posts you’ll see there has been a lot of issue dodging either by design or as an emotional response.
I implore anyone who is communicating on the board to try to avoid such language; I know it’s sometimes difficult when feeling emotional or when having strong opinions on topics. I’ve found writing posts in Word and then coming back to them a few hours later often helps me re-focus on the message & take out anything that provides the recipient with an opportunity to answer in a reactionary way. At least that’s the theory; I’ve made mistakes too but being aware of the dangers is half the battle.
I believe James is either a real person in TF who had the guts to post in what he must have known to be a possibly hostile environment, to test the water if you will of what its like after TF and therefore must be congratulated and supported (Perhaps because he is seriously considering leaving?) OR He is a very clever ploy to explore the mindset of ex-members to gather intelligence of ex-members thinking and reactions to be used by TF. OR Someone’s having a good laugh winding everyone up and the whole thing is a complete waist of everyone’s time & energy.
There’s a lot in the posts and to be honest a quick read leaves me confused as to what the truth is (someone rightly mentioned the deceivers yet true series and I think that has a lot to do with my scepticism) but I truly hope that you are James, as you sound a lot like my wife & I before we left four years ago.
People were not being honest in their fundraising & witnessing, prophecy on a local level was being used more & more to control people (although it sometimes was malicious it was also often misguided wishful thinking). Local leaders who were financially successful and autocratic in their ‘shepherding’ were rewarded by those above for having a ‘tight ship’ and placed on the Boards. The GN’s were becoming more bizarre and unreadable. There were some obvious mistakes made in published prophecies from people who hadn’t died yet or semi-famous places named but in the wrong country, oops! Or the claim that there had to be lots of extra spirit helpers on duty that day to welcome the saved dead from the 9/11 attacks. Actually compared to world wide death statistics its like having a couple of extra customers into a busy supermarket. Would you really need more staff?! Things like that. We were also dead against the loving Jesus revelation and the keys prophecies and although they are not a Charter requirement there was a lot of coercion within the GN’s to follow them if you truly wanted to be close to Jesus & receive the full blessings of TL. In essence TF had become a religion of fear. Am I close enough to TL? If I sneeze during prophecy will it mean I’ve allowed Bhacus to enter my life, something bad has happened to me, I must have displeased TL, etc.
We held on for quite a while believing that for all its lacks if we could be free to serve TL in TF then all that could be put on the back burner and we could just get on with it & be happy. It was only when we started to suffer at the hands of the local Family through their pseudo spirituality and realised through meeting other members from other continents that this was a worldwide trend and therefore lost hope that TF would not change for the better. We left. It was only afterwards that we have been able to identify and put into words what was a gut feeling about how wrong TF is on so many issues but continues to self-justify and side-step.
OK gotta run lunch time is over.